Hi Steemit!

Hello Steemit!

My name is Zan! I am super excited to be apart of this platform and also incredibly nervous. Just by browsing around, I can see that this is a community full of diverse, creative, passionate, and welcoming spirits and I’m glad to have finally joined!

On this blog I will mainly be focusing on sharing my creative writing and personal stories that I think and hope others will really enjoy. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember and it has always been a way out of dreary days in this life. I hope in the future to be able to focus on writing completely as a career.

Some of my favorite writers are Yaa Gyasi, Sylvia Plath, Moshin Hamid, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, and a million more I can’t name right now or I’ll get carried away.

My favorite book right now is Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and I strongly suggest you all read, or if you already have let me know what you think!

I love love love slam poetry and hope one day to have the guts to perform in a poetry slam myself. Though, this year I did take a huge leap and decided to perform in the Moth storyslam which has been one of the most transformative experiences of my life!

I’m also a music lover, enjoying all kinds of music but if I showed you my playlist you’ll find mostly alternative, hip hop, and rnb.

I’m currently in high school and as most of you know, I’m sure, it’s important to be able to have an escape from those dark, depressing halls. So, this will also be an outlet of sorts for me to share experiences and thoughts, some of which others may or may not relate to.

Once again, I’m really excited to be apart of this platform and even more excited to begin exploring the content you’ve all created!

Below I’ve attached a short story I wrote inspired by the theme of doors as a way of migration from danger that is explored in Moshin Hamid’s incredible novel “Exit West”:

And that night, as Nadia laboriously pushed her sofa up against the bolted door, a young woman, residing on the outskirts of a depleting ghetto, with skin resembling the hue of a bottomless sea, was doing the same. The young woman with hair tightly packed into a burning bush had been born into a certain kind of wilderness that came with being nameless, her mother, who had been just a girl when she was born, believed that the only way to protect the child, that would be a woman before her body could tell, from the physical and emotional terrorism brought on by man was to raise her as an unclaimed entity, stripped of her humanity, her essence, she could be free, for men only rob things and people and lives that belong somewhere, and this young nameless woman belonged nowhere.

From within the darkness, cradled deeply in its endless vacuum, her husband laid, the fragility of an abuser’s body expressed poignantly through his rage. One might of felt the crack of his bones and the splitting of his soul, had his bellows not been so strident, so deafening as the thrashing of his limbs, as if he were only a baby unprepared and unwanting of the world before him, suggested a struggle against the migration. Had there been light, one may have caught sight of his fists, spoiled by a violent, violet discoloring, the way they struck the darkness, seething with an apoplectic surge, and perhaps the spirit of the door sensed his resistance, the assault pronounced through his wrath, for the erasure, the severing, and cleansing that was to be this man’s initiation began to morph into a grueling and terrorizing spiral into the peaks of nothingness. His body becoming misplaced or perhaps forgotten indefinitely in the blackness.

As Pacific’s current continued thrashing atop her sea, the woman began to feel an apocalyptic sense of urgency. The first layer of skin binding each finger tip beginning to split as she, flesh deep into needles cradling the couch’s internal organs, barricaded herself from the door. Whether it occurred in her head or in that moment she had been unsure, but she felt a belabor from the other side, from within the blackness, a bone-chilling gale seeping from the void as if she were peering into his eyes once more, and it had only taken a moment, a split-second for her to choose, because her mother had been wrong, because men seemed to find bleak bodies alluring, and she his most deprived captive, it had only taken a moment for her to push, for she was now a mother herself, with a daughter who would not be a ghost in the orbs of a man’s world as she had.

She stood before the attic doorway, stitches torn from her belly, moments shy of collapsing, the blood felt fresh, the taste of exhaust and survival innate to womanhood, dripping like rain, smothering the cracks between layers of foundations and recounted footsteps, her lips swelling into strangled caterpillars, she shoved the pull of the door way’s depth down her throat. She thought she might have seen his shadow buried in the vastness, cradled deeply within a directionless existence, or perhaps her eyes’ bulged outward like an insect emerging from its cocoon, and their gaze, she could no longer trust, and each wound scattered across her body itched for salvation, they wept for her, the taste of sweat rising from her upper lip, reciting hushed hymns of her mother’s lullabies as they kissed her neck and forgave her for still loving him, she allowed for her body to grieve, slumped against the edge of the door and continuing to gaze into it’s blackness, her heart no longer racing, instead beating slowly and smoothly like the crescents of a calm ocean wave.

She closed the door.